Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Writingis the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols (writing systems).

What is writing? Writing is a method of representing language in visual or tactile form. Writing systems use sets of symbols to represent the sounds of speech, and may also have symbols for such things as punctuation and numerals.

To express or communicate in writing; give a written account of.

Writing, more particularly, refers to two things: writing as a noun, the thing that is written; and writing as a verb, which designates the activity of writing. It refers to the inscription of characters on a medium, thereby forming words, and larger units of language, known as texts. It also refers to the creation of meaning and the information thereby generated. In that regard, linguistics (and related sciences) distinguishes between the written language and the spoken language. The significance of the medium by which meaning and information is conveyed is indicated by the distinction made in the arts and sciences. For example, while public speaking and poetry reading are both types of speech, the former is governed by the rules of rhetoric and the latter by poetics.

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest conceptual meaningful component of a word, or other linguistic unit, that has semanticmeaning. The term is used as part of the branch of linguistics known as morphology.

A logogram is a written character which represents a word or morpheme. The vast number of logograms needed to write a language, and the many years required to learn them, are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems.

Semantics is a branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words, phrases and sentences, however, contrary to pragmatics it does not analyze the intended speaker meaning, or what words denote on a given occasion, but the objective, conventional meaning. Additionally, it is concerned with the conceptual meaning and not the associative meaning. The conceptual meaning is what a word in fact denotes, as for example Friday the 13 th is a day between Thursday the 12 th and Saturday the 14 th, and that is the conceptual meaning of the phrase Friday the 13 th. Yet, for many people the idea of that day brings to mind thoughts of bad luck and misfortune, which is the associative meaning.

The meaning of words is analyzed in several different ways in order to account for as many aspects of meaning as possible. First of all, words are analyzed in terms of their semantic features that is basic elements which enable the differentiation of meaning of words.

It is interesting to note that writing systems were based on spoken languages — initially, in an attempt to capture meaning via graphic representation. Spoken language is prior to written language as well in the life of every human being who becomes literate: ability to produce and comprehend written language comes later than these abilities in the spoken language. Further, whereas all human beings of even quite low I.Q. become competent native speakers, not everyone is able to acquire similar competence in the derivative, written, medium. Spoken language does not have to be taught; written language, by and large, does.